Efficient production and refining of crude oil is essential for meeting certain global energy needs. The efficiency may be impacted by the wide variation of the composition and properties of various crude oils. Crude oils obtained via downhole drilling and recovery operations may provide crude oils comprised of thousands of hydrocarbon species of variable properties and proportions. These hydrocarbon species may include gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, polymer feedstocks, and other commercially important carbonaceous products. The analysis and characterization of the various hydrocarbon fractions typically involves time intensive techniques and assays including distillation and fractionation of relatively large quantities of crude oil, with the resulting distilled and/or fractionated hydrocarbons subjected to individual analytical and physicochemical analyses. These procedures may require up to 20 liters of crude oil as a starting amount. While these procedures are well-established and widely understood by the skilled artisans of the oil industry, whole crude oil sample analyses on smaller sample sizes in the absence of chemical separations techniques may be advantageous since this may provide a procedure to characterize small samples much more rapidly.